Array of issues facing schools and teachers as classes resume

While the biggest uncertainties hang on the upcoming earlier-than-usual budget, many other issues face schools and teachers as classes resume.

These are some of the talking points likely to fill the air in staff rooms as close to 900,000 children take their places.

* The Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) and Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) will vote next month on whether to accept or reject the Haddington Road deal. They remain the only two, large public service unions not signed up to the agreement.

While TUI’s leadership is making no recommendation, the ASTI central executive decided a fortnight ago to urge its 18,000 members to reject the deal. A separate ASTI ballot on industrial action is taking place simultaneously.

Such action could kick in if they do not agree to the measures, which include cuts to pay over €65,000 and freezes on salary increments, but restoration of some of the cuts of recent years to teachers who started working since 2011.

Signing up to the deal would mean an end to payments for supervision and substitution work. But school management fears of disruption are averted until the ballot result at least, as the Department of Education has allowed previous arrangements to continue in the interim.

* Work should continue on reform of junior cycle as controversy surrounds Education Minister Ruairi Quinn’s decision that state- certified exams are to be scrapped entirely. While doing away with a high-stakes exam at the end of third year has been applauded, there are practical implications around teacher- assessed work and thorny questions of disparity between schools depending on resources.

The minister has given a commitment that the pace of change is open to amendment.

* The 2014 budget in seven weeks’ time will bring further difficulties to the running of the country’s 4,000 primary and second- level schools. There are no easy options for Mr Quinn as he tries to find more than €60m in savings at the same time that pupil numbers continue to rise rapidly.

The most talked-about consideration is increasing pupil-teacher ratios, which would push up primary class sizes and reduce subject choices at second level.

The secondary pupil- teacher ratio (PTR) was increased last year by removing schools’ automatic entitlement to guidance counsellors.

Mr Quinn has already, in his first two budgets, cut staffing for newcomer and Traveller children, teacher allocations to small schools, grant rates for college students, and allowed a 15% cut to the extra teaching given to children with disabilities so it is hard to find anything to save enough money to avoid PTR increases.

* Widespread change in the control of primary schools was to be a landmark of Mr Quinn’s ministry, but the level of public engagement with the process remains unclear.

Little has been heard in recent months on parish consultations in towns where movement on the hand-over of Catholic schools to alternative patrons was to start this year.

Of wider concern may be a lack of progress since last year’s report of the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector, particularly its recommendations on how Catholic schools cater for children of other faiths and whose parents have no choice in where they are taught.